


xo Icarus

by LambentLaments



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, Historical RPF
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-16
Updated: 2016-05-16
Packaged: 2018-06-08 19:37:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6870706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LambentLaments/pseuds/LambentLaments
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Calypso is used to finding heroes shipwrecked on her island. She hopes this time things will go differently.</p>
            </blockquote>





	xo Icarus

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the book 'xo Orpheus'.  
> Very loosely based in the PJO universe. All you need to know is that heroes other than Odysseus get shipwrecked on Calypso's island, and they all must leave, though Calypso loves them.
> 
> I don't know if anyone has ever written this pairing before, but this has been my headcanon for the longest time. It's rushed, especially at the end, because I wrote this to get out of my writer's block. I tried to write it in a slight fairytale-ish style, but I forgot during the process. I do hope that someday I'll write a better fic for this ship.

At first Calypso had thought it was a bird. The noise that rained down from the sky, however, had made it apparent it could not be. Only men could make such an ugly noise. And on a closer look, she could see the brown wings and how they were stiff and still; not like a gliding bird’s, but like the fixed legs of furniture. She watched the flying wings pass by from far away, near the horizon.

“Well, that’s new,” she said to the thin air. If she concentrated, she could almost hear It answering back.

She stood there on the shore, watching the wings fly away from her, until they were but a little dot in a sky of blue. Satisfied, she walked the little trail back up to her cave. She knew what to do. Whether it was a ship or a raft or a loud flying thing, the very fact that it had entered the seas of Ogygia left no doubts about the future of its passengers. She cooked some soft porridge, cut the herbs in her little garden, and prepared clean bandages.

She waited; there was only one thing to do. Calypso was very good at waiting. She worked herself that she wouldn’t be agitated when the waves inevitably washed up a prone figure on the beach. At the same time she did not let herself forget what she was waiting for.

“Do you think he’ll stay long this time?” she asked the thin air. She imagined It nodded in agreement. It was nice like that. But at the same time she hoped It was wrong. The longer they stayed, the longer it took her to forget. Why, it had probably taken only a few decades for her to stop crying for Drake every night, seeing he’d stayed for only a couple years. Probably. Time was strange in Ogygia. Not as strange as distance, but still strange.

All this waiting was making her think of her bad memories. That would not do. She cleaned out her cave for the second time, made sure the bed was comfortable enough, but not too cozy that it’d be hard to get out of. There. Would a faraway storm have shipwrecked (wingwrecked?) the wings now? Suddenly it occurred to her she’d spent too much time fretting about. She got her hemp stretch, hoisted up her skirt, and ran back down the trail to the beach.

He lay there, partly underwater, his curly hair moving across his face with each tide. He wore leather, lots of it; the worst he could have worn in a ship wreck. She did not dawdle, but she could not help but observe him as she drew near. He was lanky, with narrow shoulders, and she imagined he was quite young.

Dragging him from under his arms, she dragged him up shore, next to where she had left the stretch, until the waves lapped at his boots. Then she undid the jacket. There were no buttons or pins, only a thin line of metal she fumbled with until it opened with a zit-zit-zit. She undid the belt next. This she was familiar with. Drake had had something similar. She took out her knife from her own simpler belt and cut through the ivory fabric of his shirt so that his skin was revealed to her, and possibly but not quite more importantly, something (that is to say _some things_ ) that took her by surprise.

For a second she was shocked. Then in another she wasn’t. She had been a goddess, after all, and had seen many things before she’d come to learn of their worth.

She pressed the hero’s chest until she spat a mouthful of sea water. Calypso felt her pulse, and pressed her ears to her cold chest to make sure. Satisfied, she lifted the clammy torso on top of the stretch. “Come now,” she said to It, but there was no need, of course. Invisible hand lifted the hero’s feet, and carried the stretch back to the cave.

The first thing the hero said to her, two days later, was “Are those cinnamon buns?” Her eyes were barely open.

“No, just me.” Calypso had been leaning over to tidy the bed, and the hero had smelt the cinnamon in her hair. The hero made a small noise that could have meant anything. “Would you like some?” she asked, a little hurriedly.

After a long pause, she got a semi-conscious ‘no thank you’ as a reply. Calypso made them anyway, though when she came back, the hero was already asleep.

In another week, however, the hero was well enough to talk and eat. They talked as they ate the warm pastries Calypso had newly made. “That’s a very pretty name,” Calypso said sincerely. “Did they name you so because you love the air?”

The hero laughed. “No, my dad was named that, and so was his father. And his father and so on.”

“Maybe you are a descendant of Zeus, or perhaps Aeolus.”

The hero seemed to think this was a joke, and she laughed, showing all her teeth. “Your name is very pretty, too,” she said. “Like the Greek goddess?”

“Very much like that, yes.”

The hero was surprised to learn exactly how much, but she took it all in good stride. It was possible she was still recovering from her head wounds, of course, and was a bit confused about what she was being told.

Still, she healed quickly. “It’s magic,” Calypso told her when the hero was surprised to find that she had progressed from hobbling around the cave to being able to trek the hills of the island.

“How does it work?” the hero asked, curiously. They had climbed over a hill to milk the goats, the hero scampered through the rocky slopes in rather the same fashion as the animals, reveling in her newly recovered strength. Calypso had smiled at the sight. She liked doing her chores, and enjoyed the company of her new hero as well, and constantly conjoined the two pleasantries into one.

“It just does, it’s magic,” Calypso said after a pause. “Isn’t it, Adrasteia?” she asked the goat she was milking. She baaed in answer. Adrasteia was a nice goat, which was rare in itself. She was also one of the very few things on the island that answered back to her musings.

“You can speak to animals,” the hero asked, a little in awe.

“Anyone can speak to animals,” Calypso said. “The question is whether you can understand what they say back to you. I’m not magical like that, though, I’m afraid.”

She knew her explanation about magic had not been a proper one and wished she had been asked about beekeeping or herb gathering or wood working or making fish nets, other things she could do well. And she was, later on. The hero helped her with everything, who, she was happy to find, liked working with her hands as much as she did, and she as always with her, day and night.

And like that, Calypso fell in love. It was only a matter of time, of course. She had tried not to, at some point, but she had forgotten, and her resolve had broken, as it always did. The heroes the gods sent were heroes in every essence of the word, and it was very hard not to admire them, and as a natural course, adore them.

And soon, it was difficult to remember what she had been before she had begun to love her, and the reflection she occasionally saw in pools of water, that of a middle-aged woman, was infinitely recognizable, despite the fact that her physical form had been much younger when she was alone on the island. She could not remember when she had become thus, whether it was when the hero had first arrived on the island, or when she had first seen her, or when she had first kissed her. It was possible that the cause was all those things, simultaneously.

Said first kiss happened on the shore, under the stars. Calypso had asked the hero about flying, and the hero had answered. She told her of seeing the ocean stretch out before her, the world beneath her still, and the wind loud enough to drown out her thoughts until she was as tranquil as the world below. She told her of seeing a storm, and the blue sky afterwards, and her unable to believe she was still alive, and a moment later when she could, and the single feeling of being alive washed over her so that she hardly knew whether to laugh or cry.

Calypso liked these stories, until she saw the wistful look in the hero’s eyes as her eyes swept the stars above, and she was zealous; of the hero and the places she had been to, and more so of the sky, to which the hero’s heart still clearly belonged. And so she talked of Icarus; Icarus and his beautiful white wings and his joy and freedom that he mistakenly thought was worth the risk.

“He should have stayed in the maze,” she concluded.

“But then he never would have flown,” the hero said, and Calypso could tell from her words how big a misfortune she considered the prospect to be.

“He fell,” Calypso said, a little desperately. “The gods do not like anyone reaching their heights. He should have known he would fall.” She looked at the hero, willing her to understand. “Beautiful things always do.” And she kissed her, and after a moment, the hero kissed her back.

But even in that moment, when everything was bright and certain, and her punishment seemed final, Calypso knew she could not compare to the sky. She could not keep a hero from going on to change the world. She knew that heroes lived for things bigger than themselves, and that they should, for the world must sometimes be proven wong. She already saw herself standing on the shore, watching a raft and a figure that would not look back, disappear over the horizon. She already felt the years of living as a curled up ball, not knowing, not daring to wonder if she had sent the hero to her death or to glory. In her mind's eye she was already dwindling to a woman-child, on the brink of anything at all, hidden from everything that mattered, nonexistent except as a small flag of nostalgia. 


End file.
